The Book of Clouds

Product Information

From the massive, anonymous housing blocks of the former East Berlin, to the late-night and often literally underground “parties” held in abandoned buildings, to the centrally located Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (which she experiences as eerily disorienting on a shadowy, moonlit night), Tatiana’s Berlin is exactly the one you will find if you go there. It is there in her constant paranoia, her obsession with the dark corners of the city, her difficulty in connecting with most Germans around her (heck, I think it is pretty freaking obvious during some moments like when her German date wanted to play hide and seek in the Holocaust Memorial). By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Tatiana’s most satisfying relationship is with the announcer’s automated voice in the S-Bahn: ”It was the announcer’s voice. Tatiana is alienated from her family and her friends, cut off from the rest of the city, uninterested in forming a relationship with anyone.

As with that novel the writing is crisp, precise, simple, yet also eloquent, creating tension with atmosphere rather than action. There are plenty of those in Berlin, both from the Nazi and the Communist era, buildings in which people were imprisoned or tortured, now converted into schools, apartment buildings and water towers. The author sometimes makes one simple description longer than a page or more, this might seem excessive but they are actually rather good, like at the beginning, as a child, on the metro, the description of the woman who looks like Hitler. Chloe Aridjis’ debut novel Book of Clouds is the story of a young woman named Tatiana adrift in Berlin as she encounters the many phantoms of Berlin’s past.One said, “Unfortunately the prose style starts to become very annoying from quite early on, especially the childish anthropomorphism (this cloud is ‘the Darth Vader of clouds’, others are ‘lazy’ or like members of a street gang) and the lame jokes become very irritating. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. The book is illustrated with really beautiful photographs along with some line drawings that highlight some classical paintings and even some lava lamps. The photographs, many of them taken by Day himself, are outstanding, and do much to bring the book to glorious life, showing how the sky really is an enormous free outdoor cinema screen.

I felt the bits about the light and the darkness, the bits about sounds invading your sleep, the bits about trying hard to keep your neurosis in check. Sometimes she feels alienated from the city, sometimes cautiously assimilated, but always the weight of history presses in- as when she tours the infamous subterranean "Gestapo bowling alley", part psychic horror, part tourist trap ("Nazi, Stasi, what's the difference," shrugs the guide), or loses her bearings among the concrete slabs of the Holocaust memorial; or investigates ghostly noises coming from the empty apartment upstairs. There are many clouds that reference books don’t talk about: you might know what a strato-cumulus is, or a cirrus cloud, but what about a veil cloud, worn at weddings by brides?The overall effect is of one of those school science videos trying embarrassingly hard to make science ‘cool’ and ‘relevant’ but succeeds only in irritating its audience. Increasingly, I thought not of the character or narrator, or even of the implied author, but of the real author, Aridjis.

They remind parents that this is more geared toward preschool and kindergarten age children and although some older children could appreciate the book, it may be much too low of a reading level. And once you’ve discovered all the names for clouds, you probably still haven’t considered what clouds dream about, or how they dance, or how rain sounds like piano chords.I love Berlin, adore it, and I found myself mentally walking it's pathways whilst reading the book, finding myself in the grey shadow of the Fernsehturm or the more bohemian setting of Prenzlauer Berg.

If you’ve decided you want to know more about clouds, picking up the right book is a great first step! molnfantasten som sitter på 18:e våningen i sitt Plattenbau i Marzahn och pratar alltmedan han omedvetet skapar egna mentholcigarettmoln.I preferred this recorded voice to any other voice I had heard in my life, especially on days when I felt disconnected from the city, attached by the thinnest of strings. She resides in North Carolina, where she's fallen in love with thunderstorms and uses them as an excuse to get extra cuddles from her three cats.